That Freaks Me Out
by pfchristine
Summary: One shot challenge fic starring our favorite ME - Elizabeth Rodgers. Dontcha wonder what could possibly freak her out?


**A/N: **This is a one shot I wrote for a challenge over on the USA Board. I hope you enjoy it.

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"I've seen a lot, but I've got to admit, that freaks me out."

Next to her, the towheaded pixie with a belly the size of a beach ball elbowed her, barely suppressing a giggle.

"Now you tell me."

Elizabeth Rodgers gazed fondly at the girl. _Young woman_, she reminded herself. _Soon to be a young mother_. It was still incomprehensible to her that this beautiful young woman could be related to her. She was so bright, so full of life and fun. So much the opposite of her.

Her's was a hard profession. There was a lot of burnout. Liz had been more than halfway there herself when Elly had blown into her life with the tragedy of her parent's deaths on her heels. By then, jaded and cynical, Liz had thought she knew everything about death. She knew its sights, its smells, its stillness. She knew that all of its mysteries had answers and she'd mastered most of them.

Yet for all that, in the middle of her life she found herself unprepared to deal with the death of her own brother and his beautiful wife, or to help her young niece deal with it as well. She remembered wanting so badly to comfort her brother's child, only to realize she'd never bothered to develop skills in that area. But somehow Elly, with her long, blond braids, long gawky limbs and endless bubbling energy, never seemed to notice. If Liz ever _had_ figured it out, it was only because Elly had taught her.

Where Liz had expected long, sullen silences, Elly would tell long, rambling stories about her family, using her ragamuffin collection of stuffed animals to act out all the parts. She should have been angry at having this dour stand-in rather than the fun-loving parents she adored. Instead, Elly would rope her aunt into helping her create wall-sized collages with Photoshop until all the triumphs and joys of her brother's life were more real to Liz than they'd been before he died. Elly had taught her to bake cookies for bake sales, to organize half a dozen girls on trips to the Bronx Zoo or Six Flags, to just sit still and read a novel on the beach. Before she knew what was happening, her own life had become more real than it had ever been before too.

So it was a shock to the system when, as quickly as she'd whorled in to her life, Elly had whored back out again. She was off to college, then married to her handsome ROTC cadet husband right after graduation. Of course Liz still saw her a few times a month for a meal or shopping trip, but she couldn't quite shake the feeling she'd never done enough for the sparkling child who had transformed her life.

Then, six months ago, pregnant with twins and fresh from seeing her new husband off to Iraq, Elly had moved back in for the year he'd be gone. Liz was worried that the strain of his deployment and not being able to have him home for the birth of their children would be a terrible burden, but once again, Elly refused to be down-hearted. This time, instead of employing stuffed monkeys and pandas to tell her stories, they were written out in long, imaginative emails for him, along with her hilarious signature Photoshop collages comparing her belly size to every bulbous-shaped thing in nature.

Of course Liz was sad that Elly wasn't able to spend this time with the father of her children, but in a secret place in her heart, she cherished every moment of these last few months when it was only the two of them again. They baked cookies for his unit, shopped endlessly for the babies and watched silly movies until late into the night, pigging out on tacos and cheesecake… a combination only a pregnant woman could love.

Once Elly, ever the master of practical jokes, had switched the bottle of colorant in a box of her hair dye. The next time Liz went to touch up her roots, she'd rinsed out her hair to find herself with a head of bright blond, rather than her usual dark auburn. Though she'd bitched up a storm about it to her niece's laughing face, secretly it pleased her to have the same color hair as her golden child, so she'd kept it.

Then finally it came…a chance to really do something for the girl who'd done so much for her. Elly needed a childbirth coach.

Liz was thrilled… until they'd popped that tape into the VCR. Now here she sat, the bad-ass ME with the stomach of steel, on a blue mat on the floor of the local women's wellness center, watching the most god-awful thing she'd ever seen. A film on natural childbirth. It wasn't the blood or sweat or any of the other bodily fluids making her squeamish, she decided. It was the screaming. Huff and puff all you like, at some point they all screamed. Liz had to hand it to her own patients… at least they never screamed.

But this was for Elly. Liz reached over in the semi-darkness and gave her hand a squeeze, earning a bright smile. For her, Liz would do anything.


End file.
